In 2002, the AAO won several prestigious engineering awards for the IRIS-2 instrument.
A display describing the instrument was proposed as part of an exhibit on
Australian excellence in engineering at Sydney's Powerhouse Museum.
I was asked to design and commission part of that display, a model demonstrating
multi-object spectroscopy. As part of the design process, I used a ray-tracing
program (POV-Ray) to model the optical components of the display. The following
are pictures produced by that modelling.
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In this first picture, a lamp is shone through a mask representing the
IRIS-2 slit mask. A single lens images the 'stars' onto a screen. The prism
visible close to the lens is not in the light path and does not contribute
to the image. |
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The second picture shows the same optics, but with a simple prism moved
into the light path close to the imaging lens. This disperses the light
of the 'stars' and the star images on the screen now show their component
colours. This dispersed image could be used to analyse the light of each
of the stars. |
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This link
downloads a 7.7MB .avi animation of the model showing the movement of the prism,
used in checking for undesirable 'ghost' images caused by secondary reflections
and the like. Turns out there are some in intermediate prism positions but
nothing to worry about.
Unless you've got a very fast link or are in the AAO building
I wouldn't bother to download it. If your web browser doesn't cope with the
.avi format, download it to your hard drive and use Windows Media Player,
or Quicktime, or somesuch to play it. Best as a continuous loop.
Related links
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Multi-object spectrograph display
